Office Hour

D

Since there’s a warning sign at the theater entrance, it’s no spoiler to advise you that there are gunshots in Julia Cho’s (Aubergine) new play at the Public Theater. The playwright takes the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech as her inspiration and turns it into what is basically a set of variations on gun violence for no good reason that I could find. The English department at an unnamed university does not know how to deal with Dennis (Ki Hong Lee), a troubled Korean-American writing student who hides behind sunglasses and a hoodie, never speaks and whose writings are so violently perverse that the other students are afraid to come to class. In the first scene we meet three instructors — David (Greg Keller; Animal, Belleville), who flunked Dennis and is convinced that Dennis is responsible for anonymous negative reviews against him; Genevieve (Adeola Role; Eclipsed), a ringer for Nikki Giovanni who warned against the real-life shooter-to-be and threatened to resign if he were not removed from her class; and Gina (Sue Jean Kim; Aubergine, The End of Longing), his new instructor, who David and Genevieve think might be able to draw Dennis out and get him to seek help because of their shared Asian-American background. The bulk of the play consists of Dennis’s visit to Gina’s office hour, seen in several versions, all of which end badly, with an escalating level of violence. If the playwright’s intention was to show how easily we become desensitized to repetitive violence, she did succeed at that. Unfortunately I thought the main effect of the play was to trivialize an important topic. The actors are fine, although Ki Hong Lee does not fit the description of Dennis as extremely unattractive. Takeshi Kata’s (The Profane) office set has the right look and mysteriously emerges from the dark, no doubt a very expensive effect. Kaye Voyce’s (After the Blast) costumes befit the characters well. Bray Poor’s sound design is alarmingly effective. Neel Keller (Forever) directed. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission.

Forever **

Dael Orlandersmith is a poet, playwright and actress with a long association with New York Theatre Workshop where this autobiographical solo piece is now in previews. In it she describes the painful process of replacing her terrible biological family, in particular her cruel alcoholic mother, with a chosen family of the artists who inspired her, including Richard Wright and Jim Morrison, who are laid to rest in Paris’s Pere Lachaise Cemetery. The play opens with a long scene describing her visit there (too long for me apparently as I nodded off for about ten minutes). She recalls scenes from her early years in Harlem. Fortunately I awoke in time to hear her absolutely harrowing story of being raped by an intruder in the middle of the night when she was 14. A bit of levity is introduced by her telling of a crush on a handsome Irish cop who was kind to her and her fantasy of running off to Ireland with him. Even her rape could not alter her mother’s inability to give her the attention she deserved. She is unsparing in describing her own understandably cruel behavior toward her monstrous mother. A little rage goes a long way and, for me at least, hers went too far. We eventually return to the cemetery in Paris where she provides a not too convincing sign of making peace with her late mother’s memory. Takeshi Kata’s simple set has a raised platform with a table with a phonograph and two chairs; the surrounding walls have panels covered with family photographs. The theater is lined with similar panels on which the audience is invited to post messages about people influential in their lives who have passed on. Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting design is very effective. Neel Keller directed. I thought that Ms. Orlandersmith’s impressive performance exceeded her accomplishment as playwright. Running time: 80 minutes, no intermission.